The expanses of WolfWings' landscratched on the wall for all to see

July 6th, 2006

July 6th, 2006

July 6th, 2006

July 6th, 2006

July 6th, 2006

05:48 am - A couple days late punting this along...
...but love or hate Bush, Pink's song Hello, Mr. President is turning out to be remarkably good background music to program to. I can't even tell why, but for some reason that particular rendition it just right that I can 'fade it out' in my head and still enjoy the background stimulus without concentrating on 'understanding' the words.

So what am I working on? Well... I'm mostly pulling apart the Linux video-card drivers to sort numerous things out. What things? This will take a little explanation. First, there is a video-card drivers needed for 3D support:

Starting out, the 'video chipset interface' for lack of anything else to call it, what does nothing more than arbitrate what program can access the physical video card's programming interface at a time. It doesn't really know much about the card.

Next up, the X-specific '2D video support' driver, much more video-card specific, it lets things like text and normal 2D windows get drawn fast. This one is loaded by X.

Now, the '3D acceleration support' driver is in line. This one generally has identical settings to the 2D driver, and can only load 'on top of' the X-specific 2D driver.

Fourth, there is the NON-X 2D driver... yes, if you want fast text when you're not running a fancy graphics interface, you have to load a seperate driver, and usually you can't load both the X and non-X drivers at the same time or things will crash.

Now, a bit of back-story... I originally helped out with the GGI Project before the KGI Project split off from them. As it stands now, GGI is vaguely competing with SDL, and KGI is... well, not doing much that I've been able to find. What was their big goal? Well... under GGI originally, you would have one driver. That single driver would handle all the actual rendering calls. X, non-X, 3D, all of the above would access the same drivers directly.

As it is now though... well, there are four nearly-completely-seperate video-card driver groups, each working on their own seperate domain entirely resulting in a very convoluted and incredibly messy and difficult to upgrade (let alone install and configure) system of video-card drivers.

Gives me something to do at least though... slowly pulling apart all the individual graphics card drivers for my video card, and starting to write down notes and information about it. Why? I'm not sure what I'll even do with the information... but gods, there's got to be a better way than this hodge-podge of insanity. I wish I could win the lottery now, just so I could take a million dollars, hire two dozen programmers for $40k/year and drop out a replacement interface that Mesa directly interfaces to, and finish the work Xgl originally tried to accomplish. I'm probably one of the few people that would spend lottery winnings on video-card drivers though. =^.^= But I honestly believe if this wasn't so insane... so stupid, it would give a HUGE boost to Linux.

Then again, I am getting ready to roll up the initial HP L2000/Compaq V2000z Gentoo LiveCD in the next two months I sort out the video-card and WiFi issues. Because I think, honestly, that a machine-specific LiveCD is appropriate considering how bleeding-edge all this hardware is.0 commentsLeave a comment